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[photo] Defence and Security Equipment International Arms Fair (DSEI) held in London every 2 years plays a significant role in the UK Government’s mission to compete with Russia, China, and France to become the world’s second largest arms exporter
British PM, Neville Chamberlain - the arms trader
British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was a politician whose family (something historians often omit to mention) had made enormous profits from armaments manufacture. A young MP by the name of David Lloyd George had first pointed it out in the Commons in 1900, in the middle of the Boer War.
In 1939 Chamberlain still had over 23,000 shares in the Birmingham Small Arms Company, of which he had been managing director. Other Chamberlain arms companies had been receiving government contracts through the 1920s – twenty-one of them under the Tory government in a single year 1925-6. [plus ça change]
In 1939 Chamberlain also had 11,000 shares in ICI, which had taken over one of his family’s firms, and which, by 1939, was a partner of the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben, one of the companies (as we have seen) most closely associated with the Nazis. At one point ICI was accused of selling the chemicals IG Farben used to make poison gas.
Let’s not accuse Chamberlain of using the situation in Europe for personal profit. But let’s agree that he viewed it with the limited mindset of a businessman. It explains a whole lot.
#90 British appeasement, a sinister game? - Ep 9 Trading with the Nazis
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[photo] German troops march into Prague Castle following the Nazis invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.
Chamberlain had two ‘Dominic Cummings’
Chamberlain was so shockingly ill-informed he was carried along by forces he had no idea existed. You only have to look at who he was getting his advice from!
His private strategist, Sir Horace Wilson, was Head of the Home Civil Service. He had no business whatsoever meddling in foreign affairs but did so with consistent calamity. In fact Wilson knew nothing and generously shared his ignorance with Chamberlain.
In 1938 Chamberlain allowed Wilson to fly to meet Hitler secretly at his mountain hideaway. They were going to ‘clarify’ matters between themselves over the surrender of much of Czechoslovakia to Germany. In Wilson’s mind ‘Czechoslovakia had no business to exist as it was.’
Chamberlain’s political advisor – a fellow fly-fisherman - was Joseph Ball. He was violently anti-socialist and had been one of Tory Central Office’s first ‘spin doctors’ on today’s equivalent of a six-figure salary.
He infiltrated the papers, the BBC and the British Film Industry, not least by negotiating the selling of knighthoods and other honours. As Geoffrey Dawson, the Tory editor of the Times recalled, ‘night after night,’ Ball would be on the line, telling Dawson, ‘to keep out of the paper anything that might have hurt the Germans’ susceptibility.’
[painting] Neville Chamberlain fly fishing by Ernest H. Thomas
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‘I am pretty certain … that the Nazis will clean things up and put Germany on the way to being a real power in Europe again'
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